Signs of a shift over bones of contention

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Nearly 100 years after Swedish scientists raided Aboriginal
burial sites and smuggled out the skeletons saying they were
kangaroo bones, indigenous men fought back tears as they brought
the remains back to Australia.

Now the most trenchant opponent of repatriation, the British
Museum of Natural History, has indicated it is prepared to send
some remains back to Australia,

says the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Amanda Vanstone.

She was also advised this week that the Bristol City Museum and
Art Gallery would return indigenous remains as well.

A former ATSIC commissioner, Rodney Dillon, said he had been
impressed by a change in attitude in the past six months at the
natural history museum, which holds nearly 500 Australian
indigenous remains.

"It's not a complete change, and they are only talking about
some of them, but they are looking more at the importance of the
spirit," Mr Dillon said.

Sweden's Museum of Ethnography initiated this return after
diaries of Eric Mjoeberg's 1910 expedition were published, exposing
his unethical and illegal exploits as a collector. The stories
outraged many Swedes.

Other Swedish museums have also returned material to states
including NSW and Victoria. These were the first returns from
museums in continental Europe.

The National Museum of Australia's repatriation director,
Michael Pickering, said he was unaware of the change of attitude
among the museums in Britain, where a Cambridge University
anthropologist, Robert Foley, has warned that repatriating their
collection of human remains would be "tragic".

As more museums agreed to repatriate human remains, those
against it had become more vocal and heated, Mr Pickering said.

Dr Foley has said there is "huge interest" in how modern humans
came out of Africa and spread across the world. "These bones help
us understand that," he said.

Joey Chatfield, who travelled from Camperdown, Victoria to
Sweden to bring back the remains of one of his Gunditjmara/Kirrae
Wurrong ancestors, was confused and saddened about why they had
ever been taken. "Worse is that the scientific research wasn't even
carried out for their own benefit."